This new cookbook will broaden your imagination about what Italian food is and can be through recipes from the innovative chefs at the Big Mamma restaurant group, who make traditional Italian dishes with a modern flair. Everything is here for recreating a splendid Italian meal at home, from appetizers to desserts, interspersed with helpful tips from the chefs on such topics as “How to Choose and Serve Fish” or “The Real Tomato Sauce” (which is surprisingly simple to make, but an essential component of many dishes).

Cookbook writer Paul Stuart has plans to write a book entitled The Philosophy of Food at home in Edinburgh, but after a breakup with his girlfriend and editor Gloria, he gets a chance to accompany his cousin Chloe to France. Surely the change of scenery will spur him to finish his manuscript – at least that is what he’s hoping. But that’s before Paul discovers the second-worst restaurant in France, right in the village where he is staying.

This Pusheen cookbook is a feast for the eyes. The photography is absolutely stunning, with almost every image decorated in colors of pastel pinks, greens, and purples. Everything is so insanely cute! My children (who are all total Pusheen fans) could not stop pouring over the cookbook. They wanted to try all the recipes.

The main reason to buy cookbooks is to get new recipes that one can try and enjoy. The first criterion is that readers can make the intended dish. If the recipes are not duplicated or contain ingredients that the reader does not consume, then the book’s utility increases. If those recipes are from faraway lands or provide a health benefit, so much the better.

Author Leela Cyd presents an incredibly beautiful cookbook of her favored recipes, based on foods she has sampled around the globe, to which she adds her own unique touch. The photography in this book is stunning, and every single picture exudes winsome seduction and charm. However, the recipes themselves are somewhat less appealing.

Brownies, Blondies, and Bars is a cookbook for just that. Fellow baking enthusiasts will be excited to flip through page after page of drool-inducing photographs and recipes that promise to disappear just as quickly as you are able to make them (which is faster than you might expect).

“The exchanges usually end with a gale of laughter. One such gale is particularly explosive, so powerful in fact that they don’t hear the front door open and the pitter-patter of little feet. It takes Annie a moment to notice a little girl in her kitchen, wearing a brown onesie with a kangaroo on it and a pink tutu-like skirt with an embroidered pouch.”

Filled cover to cover with beautiful photography, delicious and simple recipes, and local attractions, Eating Up the West Coast is an innovative hybrid between a cookbook and a West Coast guidebook.  With six routes that cover sections of Southern and Northern California, Oregon, and Washington, readers truly get a taste of the road less traveled and the recipes that are infused with back road traditions.

Very few home cooks qualify to use The Smoking Bacon & Hog Cookbook but those who do, will find this book by Bill Gillespie excellent. First you must own at least one good smoker, preferably two: a non-insulated bullet-style and an insulated cabinet smoker. Gillespie uses both plus you also need a good charcoal grill. Gillespie starts with the basics, reviewing what you need and describing the two types of smokers—too bad he did not think of illustrating them.